Hostel 4K 2005 Unrated

At first glance, it might seem like “Hostel” is a remake of “Eurotrip.” Two Americans and an Icelander who joins them arrive in Amsterdam in search of wild European sex. Along the way, the guys smoke weed, party at clubs, and visit the Red Light District…
But Amsterdam turns out not to be such a great city for entertainment after all. Unsatisfied, the trio makes further plans to hook up with European girls.

Quite by chance, an average Amsterdam tourist approaches them and declares that they need to head east, specifically to Slovakia: the girls there are easy—God knows how. Delighted, the three buddies rush to catch the first train to Bratislava and find themselves in a socialist sex paradise, where the girls are always up for it, and hooking up with a foreigner is every one of their dreams. But something’s not right here. It’s all somehow too good to be true. And people are slowly starting to disappear…

Actually, the gory part of the movie doesn’t start until the middle. The first half is a tribute to ’70s horror films, where it was considered good form if nothing much happened in the first forty-five minutes. But in the second half, viewers who came to see a horror movie will get their fill: sawing, cutting, drilling, burning, chopping, and dismembering human bodies will be carried out here with particular thoroughness. “Hostel” is, as they say, pushing the limits of the R rating: the film constantly teeters on the edge between NC-17 and R, and at times even tries to cross over into snuff-movie territory. If the director had chosen just a slightly different angle, that would have been it… and the coveted 18th letter of the Latin alphabet would have been out of the question.

Is this movie scary? Probably not. It’s more repulsive than scary, since watching a human body being cut up isn’t particularly scary, but it is very unpleasant. Most likely, the people who were most frightened while watching the movie were the hamburger-eaters, because two American citizens find themselves completely defenseless in some Eastern European country where the locals still drive bizarre cars, where there’s no American consulate, where everything is mired in corruption, where juvenile gangs stroll calmly through the streets, where…

Eli Roth has made a solid horror film, confirming that the trend for ’70s-style horror movies is making a comeback. It’s just that the marketing campaign played a cruel joke on the film: we were promised what was practically the scariest movie of the decade. And what did we get? A scary movie? Partly yes, but certainly not the scariest movie of the decade.